Outdoors: Some owl populations are surging

Monday

Jan 20, 2014 at 11:52 PMJan 21, 2014 at 12:17 AM

Mark Blazis Outdoors

Being an owl is tough. In their mysterious, mostly nocturnal world, about 80 percent of our resident juvenile great-horned, barred and screech owls will die in their first year trying to learn their territory and how to hunt for themselves. Larger owls will eat a number of them.

I love their big eyes, upright stance and silent flight. I hope to shoot all 200 species of them with my camera. On the walls of our downstairs bathroom are a couple dozen of them that I photographed from the Amazon to Zimbabwe.

One of my favorites is Africa's huge and unusual Pel's fishing owl. It sits with tilted head on a low branch barely above the water, listening for fish to dive on at night. Next to a brown fishing owl from India is a gorgeous, immaculately white snowy owl, the amazing Arctic species that's invading our region this winter.

Their phenomenal irruption, dominated by darker-marked juveniles and females, now affords us a special opportunity to observe them without having to venture north to the tundra. They've been seen recently at the Worcester Airport and in the Sturbridge Christmas Count area.

While the winter of 2013-14 may go down as one of the biggest irruptions ever, it probably won't top the mega-flight of 1926-27. Over a thousand snowy owls were reported in New England then, and almost 300 just in Massachusetts.

Breeding about a thousand miles north of the closest forests, snowy owls normally inhabit the tree-less barrens, where caribou and ptarmigan, rough-legged hawks, Arctic fox, wolves, musk ox and jaegers roam. They breed and hunt in vast open spaces where the sun hardly goes down in summer. Their diurnal behavior and spectacular plumage make them conspicuous and irresistibly photogenic.

In summer, they may eat Arctic hares, nesting shorebirds and their eggs. In winter, they sometimes fly out on to the ice floes to eat puffins, dovekies, razorbills and murres — and even scavenge on polar bear seal kills.

Irruptions are periodic and unpredictable, generally coming when collared and brown lemmings, their two primary Arctic prey, crash in numbers — or when the snowy owl population just gets too high. You could compare their forced migration to humans desperately leaving Ireland during the potato famine.

With a surprising explosion of lemmings this past year, the snowy owl population surged, too. There just may be too many owls competing with each other up north. Something abnormal may be happening in the Arctic, though, too, as we've now had an unprecedented three consecutive irruption years. They've been great entertainment for bird-watchers, but very stressful for the snowy owl population.

Facing food shortages at home, the snowy owls are forced to venture far south, looking for familiar, tree-less open habitat with sufficient prey to sustain them. That means in our region descending on tundra-like coastal beaches at Plum Island, Salisbury or airports where gulls, ducks, voles and rats can sustain them. Tough, opportunistic and desperately hungry, though, one snowy owl in Rhode Island recently killed a barn owl for his dinner.

The Boston Harbor islands and Logan Airport are now the epicenter for their southerly migration. Deemed a risk to planes, snowies are live-trapped, banded and relocated to other areas in the state. It's not surprising to see a dozen or more at Logan now, and over the years, about 500 of them have been removed from there

Four-pound snowy owls are the heavyweights of the owl family in North America. They need the additional mass to help withstand the Arctic cold. Great gray owls, which also may migrate south this year, may look bigger, but they don't have the snowy's muscle. Our imposing great-horned owls, by comparison, are middleweights.

There are two other rare northern owls on the bathroom wall that could show up in our region, too, this winter: the little boreal owl and the northern hawk owl. The latter has a long tail and falcon-like profile.

The bathroom hawk owl was photographed in 1981 at Payson Park in Portland, Maine. When I first heard about it on the local birders' hotline, I didn't bother to make the trip, knowing from experience that hawk owls typically stay only a day or so before moving on. Many a birder has gone looking for a reported sighting only to find it having disappeared.

I was intrigued, though, to learn that the following weekend, it was still being reported. I had to make the trek to see this unusually cooperative rarity.

Pulling into the park just after dawn, I needed only minutes to find the diurnal predator perched high in the open, actively hunting. Other Maine birders were already there as well, some having seen it several times the previous week. One told me the surprising reason this hawk owl hadn't moved on.

"Two retired lady school teachers have been going to the pet store every morning, buying mice there, and releasing them here in the park. This owl is staying because he knows he's got a good thing." We all laughed, grateful to those special two ladies.

Many winters back in Fairbanks, Alaska, there was a funny story in the newspaper about hawk owls. With snow piled up high on both sides, the main highway was like a canyon. Several drivers on it called police to report two crazy people up on the snow mounds casting fishing rods.

Turns out they were wildlife biologists tagging northern hawk owls. They'd approach a perched hawk owl on a telephone pole, and cast a mouse attached to the fishing line under its pole.

As the hawk owl dove in to catch the quickly retrieved mouse, the biologist's partner would net it with a long-handled fishing net.

The snowies being banded and relocated here this winter deserve our tender care and appreciation. They've come so far — and still have a long, tough journey ahead of them.